1923-24-BBC overseas radio service first broadcast the
Chimes of Big Ben around the world.

===================

1940-41- Avant Garde artists John Sloan and Marcel Duchamp
break into the Washington Square Arch in and declare Greenwich Village the
Republic of New Bohemia. Like coool, daddy.

================

1941- A Warner Bros memo dated this day from producer Hal
Wallis office announced that the movie to be made from a play by Murray Bennett
called “Everybody Goes to Rick’s” has been renamed “Casablanca”. This was to
capitalize on an already popular film title “Algiers” with Charles Boyer “come
with me to ze Casbah” etc.. Humphrey Bogart got the lead after George raft
first turned it down. Bogie told a friend about his new project: “It’s just
some more sh*t like Algiers.”

=================

1943- Four hundred policemen are called out to control
frenzied crowds of bobbysoxers as Frank Sinatra played the Paramount Theater in
Times Square. OOHH FRANKIE !!

================

1946- The first Pismo Beach Clam Festival.

==============

1947- Roy Rogers married Dale Evans.

===============

1962- Romanoffs closed. One of the premier hot spots on the
Sunset Strip, it was the preferred hangout of Humphrey Bogart, who liked to
play chess in the afternoon with Nick Romanoff when he was between films.

==========================

1985- Singer Ricky Nelson died when his band's converted old
DC-9 airplane crashed near DeKalb, Texas. Nelson it was said had been living on
a steady diet of cheeseburgers and Snicker's bars.

1941- “I Vant to be
Alone..” Film Star Greta Garbo announced she was retiring from motion
pictures and all public appearances. She made her disappearing act complete and
was only seen fleeting on the streets of New York until her death in the 1990s.

=========================

1963- T.V. game show "Let's Make a Deal" with
Monty Hall premieres.

=========================

1988 the Pixar short Tin Toy released. The first CG short to
win an Oscar. Until this win, Steve Jobs was resisting his animation team
making films. He was focused on getting color graphics onto home computers.

1913- Cecil B.DeMille telegraphed his partners back in New
York:” Flagstaff no good for our purpose.
Have proceeded to California. Want authority to rent a barn in a place called
Hollywood for $75 a month.” His partner Sam Goldwyn cabled back: “ Rent barn on month to month basis. Do not
make long commitment.” DeMille began shooting the Squaw Man, the first
Hollywood Film.

1964 – To create the first pilot of the TV series Star Trek,
the original filming model of the U.S.S. Enterprise was delivered by model
maker Rick Datin, Jr, based on the design created by Star Trek production
artist Walter “Matt” Jefferies.The
“miniature” was 11 feet long!

1965- First day shooting on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: a
Space Odyssey. It was an indoor set at Elstree Studios in England, and the
first setup was the inspection of the excavation of the Monolith in the moon
crater Tycho.

=====================

1968- Animator Bill Tytla died at age 64, from complications
of a stroke.

1895- THE BIRTHDAY OF CINEMA- In Paris at the Grande Cafe
des Capuchines the Lumiere brothers combined Edison's kinetoscope using George
Eastman’s roll film with a magic lantern projector and showed a motion picture
to an audience in a theater. Back in the U.S. Thomas Edison thought the idea of
projecting film in a theater was foolish and would never catch on. They called
their device a Cinematograph, hence the word Cinema is born. The screening
included dancers and people leaving a factory but the biggest reaction out of
the audience was from shots of waves crashing on a rocky beach. The audience in
the front row jumped for fear of getting wet.

=====================================

1897- Edmond Rostands famous play CYRANO DE BERGERAC premiered
in Paris. There really lived a poet-duelist in the 1640’s named Cyrano de
Bergerac-Servigan but little was known about him. Rostand created the
hopelessly big nosed hero who helps another man romance his true love.

=======================================

1914- THE FIRST TRUE CHARACTER ANIMATION- Windsor McCay's
"Gertie the Dinosaur" premieres as part of a vaudeville act. Up to
then most U.S. animations were attempts to bring popular newspaper comic
characters to life, but Gertie was a new character never before seen. Some critics
had wondered if animated characters weren’t some kind of man in a special suit,
so McCay drew a dinosaur, a character that couldn’t possibly be impersonated by
a living thing.The brilliant
draftsmanship and timing of this film would inspire the generation of Animation
artists of the Golden Age of the 1930's-40s.

=======================

1928- Last recording of Ma Rainey, The Mother of the Blues.

1928- Louis Armstrong recorded West End Blues.

1944- ON THE TOWN, a musical written by Betty Comden &
Adolf Green and young composer Leonard Bernstein premiered in NY.

1887- Beginning of the Sherlock Holmes
story the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

=======================================

1904- PETER PAN, OR, THE BOY WHO
WOULDN’T GROW UP, a play by James Barrie, opened at the Duke of York Theatre in
London. Barrie reserved seats in the opening night performance for orphaned children
who laughed and cheered all night. Peter llewlyn Davies, the little boy Barrie
befriended who was the basis for Pan, used to say:” I am not Peter Pan. Mr
Barrie is.”, He committed suicide in 1960 at age 75. James Barrie once said to
H.G. Wells:” It’s all right and good to write books, but can you wiggle your
ears?”

====================================

1927- Broadway musical
"ShowBoat" debuts at the Ziegfeld theater. Based on a story by Edna
Ferber, the music was written by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein. The play
made a star out of a tall black baritone named Paul Robeson.” Ol’ Man River..”

======================================

1935- Radio City Music Hall
opened. The Art Deco masterpiece was for many years the largest indoor theater
in the world, seating over 6,000.

1940- Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler
announced their separation.

------------------------------------------------------

1943- The movie The Song of
Bernadette premiered.

=================================

1947- The "Howdy-Doody Show”
debuted on NBC. Buffalo Bob, Howdy and Clarabell the Clown, also known as the
Puppet Playhouse.

1924- Baby Frances Gumm first appeared on a stage at 2 1/2
years old. Grown up she would change her name to Judy Garland.

==================================

1926- Young artist Al Hirschfeld had made his first regular
caricature for the Broadway Stage. A drawing of actor Sasha Guitry. A friend
took it to The New York Tribune and sold it. He figured here's a nifty way to
make a living, so soon he was selling to all the papers including the New York
Times.

He will keep doing caricatures of Broadway greats into the
millennium and became a legend himself. In the American Theater a Hirschfeld
caricature of you meant you had arrived and were a real star. At age 94 he
remarried and drew the cast of Ally McBeal for TV Guide. In 2003 he died just
shy of age 100, drawing to the end.

==============================

1939- Walt Disney Animation moves from Hyperion to the new
Burbank Studio lot. The buildings are designed like hospital wards, so in case
he hits economic trouble, Disney could sell them to the planned St. Joseph's
Hospital across the street. Animator Ward Kimball said it was the first time he
worked in a studio where all the furniture matched. The old Hyperion Studio was
bulldozed in 1966, the year of Walt Disney’s death.

============================

1941- Goofy cartoon, the Art of Self Defense, premiered.

==========================

1944- Tennessee Williams play the Glass Menagerie premiered
in Chicago.

==================================

1973- The horror film The Exorcist starring Linda Blair
premiered. Merry Christmas! Have some pea soup!

1836- According to the novel Moby Dick, today is the day the
Pequod set sail from Natucket.

1929- The Fox Atlanta Theater opened on Peachtree St. An
Arabian Nights-type fantasy in part financed by the Shriners so they could use
it for their meetings.

1931-The first BBC World Service Network broadcast. An
address by King George V called "Around the Empire".

1937-NBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the legendary
Arturo Toscanini premieres with its first radio broadcast.

1946- Comedian W.C. Fields died of alcoholism at 67.While in his hospital bed someone saw him
reading a Bible. They said:" W.C. what are you doing with that? "
Fields replied:" Looking for loopholes!"

1955- Chuck Jone's 'One Froggy Evening' premiered. Director
Steven Spielberg called it the "Citizen Kane of Cartoons." If you
wonder why you never heard the old time ditty 'The Michigan Rag' anywhere else
but here, was because Chuck Jones & Mike Maltese wrote it specifically for
the cartoon.

1977- Charlie Chaplin died quietly in his sleep at Vevey,
Switzerland. He was 86.

1980- Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns finished reading Simon
Schaara’s novel about the Battle of Gettysburg called The Killer Angels. He tells
his father he is inspired to make a documentary about the Civil War. The Civil
War took six years to make and ran in 1990, but it was one of the most popular
documentary films in the US and redefined the medium of documentary filmmaking.

1818-the
song Silent Night first sung at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Obersdorf,
Austria. It’s lyrics were written by the minister named Josef Mohr and music by
a teacher named Franz Gruber. Their church could not afford an organ, so this
first singing of Silent Night was accompanied on a guitar.

---------------------------------------------------------

1888-
Vincent Van Gogh cuts off a piece of his left ear after an argument with fellow
artist Paul Gaugin over the affections of a prostitute named Rachel. He sent
his ear to the prostitute. She fainted. Recent scholarship theorizes his ear
was sliced off by Gaugin waving an antique sword.

=======================================

1925-
The London Evening News published a story “ In which we are introduced to
Winnie the Pooh, and some Bees.” By A.A. Milne. The first book comes out the
following year.

1952-
First draft script completed on the MGM film Terror Planet, changed to “
Forbidden Planet.”

======================

1964-
First day shooting on the “Cage” a pilot for a new TV show called Star Trek.
Jeffrey Hunter was the first captain, later replaced by William Shatner when
Hunter’s wife advised him to skip the series. She was worried he’d be typecast.

==============================

1966-
Local New York City TV station WPIX premiered The Yule Log. They ran a loop of
6 minutes of a closeup of a log burning in a fireplace in Gracie Mansion. The
loop ran from 11:00PM to 1:00AM with Christmas carols playing. It made the TV
the metaphorical family hearth. New Yorkers loved their kitschy Yule Log
tradition and when WPIX tried to replace it in 1989 hundreds of complaints
forced them to put it back the following year. The log was taped once more in
1970, and that’s been the film ever since.

====================================

1968-
Twentieth Century Fox announced that legendary Japanese film director Akira
Kurosawa had been fired from the production of TORA-TORA-TORA. Producer Darryl
Zanuck’s original concept was the story of the Pearl Harbor attack told by
Kurosawa from the Japanese side and David Lean from the American side. But Lean
passed and Richard Fleischer stepped in.Japanese sections were directed by Toshio Fukusaku and Masuda, whose
previous credit was The Green Slime.

========================================

1990-
Tom Cruise married Nicole Kidman.

1997- 62 year old Film director Woody Allen married 27 year
old Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former lover Mia Farrow. When
asked to explain himself the director said: " The Heart wants what it
Wants.."